Margaret Hedstrom is Associate Prosfessor in the School of Information
and Libary Studies at the University of Michigan

Digital preservation: a time bomb for Digital Libraries

Margaret Hedstrom

The challenges of digital preservation

The purpose of preservation is to ensure protection of
information of enduring value for access by present and future
generations (Conway, 1990: 206). Libraries and archives have
served as the central institutional focus for preservation, and
both types of institutions include preservation as one of their
core functions. In recent decades, many major libraries and
archives have established formal preservation programs for
traditional materials which include regular allocation of resources
for preservation, preventive measures to arrest deterioration of
materials, remedial measures to restore the usability of selected
materials, and the incorporation of preservation needs and
requirements into overall program planning.

Preservationists within the library and archival community
have been instrumental in developing an array of tools and
methodologies to reduce the decay of traditional materials and to
restore books and documents that have deteriorated to such an
extent that their longevity and usability are threatened.
Provisions for fire protection and adequate environmental controls
frequently are incorporated into new library and archival
facilities. Rehousing of acid-based paper materials is a common
task in many repositories and microfilming is used extensively and
cost effectively to preserve endangered materials. Undertakings
such as the brittle books initiative, the American Newspapers
Project, and the NEH-funded microfilming program have saved
millions of unique and imperiled items (Preserving the Intellectual
Heritage). Many libraries and archives have curbed their voracious
appetites for acquisition and collecting in an effort to balance
the breadth and depth of their holdings against long-term
stewardship responsibilities. The change over from acid to
alkaline paper in publishing and much desktop printing counts as a
significant victory for preservation.

Much remains to be done to preserve cultural, intellectual,
and scholarly resources in traditional formats that form the
foundation for humanities research and teaching. An estimated 80
million embrittled books reside in American libraries, 10 million
of which are unique; and countless journals, newspapers,
photographs, and documents require preservation treatment to
survive well into the next century. Thousands of repositories lack
the means for disaster prevention or adequate environmental
controls to avoid catastrophic loss of their holdings. The success
stories and regular use of established preservation methods are
found almost exclusively in developed countries, and within
developed countries in preservation of print materials in major
institutions (Preservation of Archival Materials).

Digital preservation raises challenges of a fundamentally
different nature which are added to the problems of preserving
traditional format materials. By digital preservation, I mean the
planning, resource allocation, and application of preservation
methods and technologies necessary to ensure that digital
information of continuing value remains accessible and usable. I
intentionally use the term "continuing" rather than "permanent"
value to avoid both the absolutism and the idealism that the term
"permanent" implies (O'Toole). My concept of digital preservation
encompasses material that begins its life in digital form as well
as material that is converted from traditional to digital formats.

Recording media for digital materials are vulnerable to
deterioration and catastrophic loss, and even under ideal
conditions they are short lived relative to traditional format
materials. Although archivists have been battling acid-based
papers, thermo-fax, nitrate film, and other fragile media for
decades, the threat posed by magnetic and optical media is
qualitatively different. They are the first reusable media and
they can deteriorate rapidly, making the time frame for decisions
and actions to prevent loss is a matter of years, not decades.

More insidious and challenging than media deterioration is the
problem of obsolescence in retrieval and playback technologies.
Innovation in the computer hardware, storage, and software
industries continues at a rapid pace, usually yeilding greater
storage and processing capacities at lower cost. Devices,
processes, and software for recording and storing information are
being replaced with new products and methods on a regular three- to
five-year cycle, driven primarily by market forces. Records created
in digital form in the first instance and those converted
retrospectively from paper or microfilm to digital form are equally
vulnerable to technological obsolescence.

Another challenge is the absence of established standards,
protocols, and proven methods for preserving digital information.
With few exceptions, digital library research has focussed on
architectures and systems for information organization and
retrieval, presentation and visualization, and administration of
intellectual property rights (Levy and Marshall). The critical
role of digital libraries and archives in ensuring the future
accessibility of information with enduring value has taken a back
seat to enhancing access to current and actively used materials.
As a consequence, digital preservation remains largely experimental
and replete with the risks associated with untested methods; and
digital preservation requirements have not been factored into the
architecture, resource allocation, or planning for digital
libraries.

My assigned topic "mass storage and long-term preservation"
offers fertile ground for discussing conceptual and methodological
challenges facing digital libraries and archives. The two terms
"mass storage" and "long-term preservation" embrace a contradiction
in the current state of affairs of digital library development,
representing a time bomb that threatens the long-term viability of
this new type of library. New technologies for mass storage of
digital information abound, yet the technologies and methods for
long-term preservation of the vast and growing store of digital
information lag far behind. Strategies, methods, and technologies
for long-term preservation of digital information that already
exist or are being discussed, designed, and developed today have
yet to demonstrate the technological or economic feasibility of
operating on a mass scale. Our ability to create, amass and store
digital materials far exceeds our current capacity to preserve even
that small amount with continuing value.

Digital Preservation Requirements

In order to preserve digital materials on a scale commensurate
with mass storage capabilities and in formats that are accessible
and usable, it is necessary to articulate some basic requirements.
There are two ways to examine digital preservation requirements:
from the perspective of users of digital materials and from the
view of libraries, archives, and other custodians who assume
responsibility for their maintenance, preservation, and
distribution. Libraries and archives will not accomplish their
preservation missions if they do not satisfy the requirements of
their users by preserving materials in formats that enable the
types of analyses that users wish to perform. At the same time,
libraries and archives are unlikely to be able to satisfy all
requirements of all potential users primarily due to resource
constraints. By making explicit preservation requirements from
both the users' and custodians' perspectives, libraries and
archives will be better able to integrate digital preservation into
overall planning and resource allocation.

The potential uses of digital materials are varied,
unpredictable, and almost endless (Gould). Any generalizations,
even if restricted to one community of users such as humanities
scholars, run the risk of overlooking and understating potential
user needs. Precise requirements for presentation and analytical
tools vary among disciplines, yet some basic requirements are
likely to transcend fields and disciplines. The ability to
establish the authenticity and integrity of a source is critical to
users, whether it is generated by an individual, created in the
conduct of institutional business, or produced through a formal
publication process (Lynch). Mechanisms that will enable users to
establish authenticity require archives and libraries to store much
more than the content of digital documents. Attributes such as
formal document structures, metadata that document the maintenance
and use history of the document, time and date stamps, and a series
of references among documents are essential for determining
authenticity and for understanding the provenance of sources and
placing them in a larger context (Graham).

Michelson and Rothenberg (1992) argue that networking and
access to digital sources will change all dimensions the scholarly
work process, including identifying sources, communicating with
colleagues, interpreting and analyzing data, disseminating research
findings, and teaching. If their projections are correct, digital
preservation programs must support a high degree of integration of
source material into analytical processes by coupling research
sources with the tools necessary to analyze them; by maintaining
linkages between research results and the sources on which they are
based; and by providing a means to incorporate primary sources into
teaching. Users will seek documents that are easily retrieved and
manipulated, transmittable, and transportable from a repository to
the sites of research, presentation, and teaching. It seems safe
to assume that humanities scholars will need the capability to
search through and select relevant sources from large bodies of
heterogenous materials, to compare sources to each other, and to
view specific documents at high levels of granularity. Digital
preservation will add little value to the research process if it
serves only as an alternative form of storage from which analog
replicas are produced for use with conventional analytical methods.
Preserving digital materials in formats that are reliable and
usable, however, will require long-term maintenance of structural
characteristics, descriptive metadata, and display, computational,
and analytical capabilities that are very demanding of both mass
storage and software for retrieval and interpretation.

Digital preservation requirements may be expressed differently
by archives, libraries, and other types of repositories that are
struggling to meet escalating user expectations with limited
financial and technical resources. Storage systems should be
capable of handling digital information in a wide variety of
formats, including text, data, graphics, video, and sound. Digital
storage is not only an alternative means for storing print formats
because many types of digital objects do not have print equivalents
and cannot be preserved in non-digital formats. Ideally, storage
media will have a long life expectancy, a high degree of disaster
resistance, sufficient durability to withstand regular use, and
very large storage capacities. Conversion from analog to digital
formats and migration to new generations of technology will be
rapid, accurate, and inexpensive enough to permit very large scale
transfers of heterogeneous materials. Storage space requirements
will be minimal and not demand highly sensitive environmental
controls. To make digital preservation affordable to the widest
possible range of organizations and individuals, equipment, media,
and maintenance costs must be modest.

Current Preservation Strategies and Their Limitations

Most librarians and archivists have accepted the basic wisdom
-- for now at least -- that digital preservation depends upon
copying, not on the survival of the physical media (Lesk). But
copying, also referred to as "refreshing" or "migration" is more
complex than simply transferring a stream of bits from old to new
media or from one generation of systems to the next. Complex and
expensive transformations of digital objects often are necessary to
preserve digital materials so that they remain authentic
representations of the original versions and useful sources for
analysis and research (Task Force on Archiving of Digital
Information).

Current methods for preserving digital materials do not fully
support achieving these objectives. When faced with the
responsibility for preserving digital materials, archives and
libraries face a series of complex and difficult choices based on
the format of the original materials, the anticipated uses for it,
and the technical and financial resources available to invest in
preservation initiatives. I will review some current preservation
strategies beginning with the most elementary and established
methods and ending with proposals that have not yet been tested.

Probably the most commonly used preservation strategy is to
transfer digital information from less stable magnetic and optical
media by printing page images on paper or microfilm. It seems
ironic that just as libraries and archives are discovering digital
conversion as a cost-effective preservation method for certain
deteriorating materials, much information that begins its life in
electronic form is printed on paper or microfilm for safe, secure
long-term storage. Yet, high-quality acid neutral paper can last
a century or longer while archival quality microfilm is projected
to last 300 years or more. Paper and microfilm have the additional
advantage of requiring no special hardware or software for
retrieval or viewing. Perhaps this explains why in many digital
conversion projects, the digital images serve as a complement to
rather than a replacement for the original hard copy materials
(Conway, 1994).

Another strategy for digital preservation is to preserve
digital information in the simplest possible digital formats in
order to minimize the requirements for sophisticated retrieval
software. Digital information can be transferred across successive
generations of technology in a "software-independent" format as
ASCII text files or as flat files with simple, uniform structures.
Several data archives hold large collections of numerical data that
were captured on punch cards in the 1950s or 1960s, migrated to two
or three different magnetic tape formats, and now reside on optical
media. As new media and storage formats were introduced, the data
were migrated without any significant change in their logical
structure. This approach has the distinct advantage of being
universal and easy to implement. It is a cost-effective strategy
for preserving digital information in those cases where retaining
the content is paramount, but display, indexing, and computational
characteristics are not critical. As long as the preservation
community lacks more robust and cost-effective migration
strategies, printing to paper or film and preserving flat files
will remain the methods of last resort for many institutions and
for certain formats of digital information.

Libraries and archives with large, complex, and diverse
collections of digital materials are only beginning to test
strategies that normalize various types of holdings by converting
digital records from the great multiplicity of formats into a
smaller, more manageable number of standard formats (University of
the State of New York). A repository might accept textual
documents only in one or a few commonly available commercial word
processing formats or require that documents conform to standards
like SGML (ISO 8879). Databases might be stored in one or a few
common formats or converted to a SQL (Structured Query Language)
compliant format, while image files might conform to the tagged
image file format (TIFF) with standard compression algorithms.

This approach has the advantage of preserving more of the
display, dissemination, and computational characteristics of the
original materials, while reducing the large variety of customized
transformations that would otherwise be necessary to migrate
material to future generations of technology. The strategy rests on
the assumption that software products which are either compliant
with widely adopted standards or are widely dispersed in the
marketplace are less volatile than the software market as a whole.
Most common commercial products today provide utilities for
backward compatibility and for swapping documents, databases, and
more complex objects between software systems. Although this
strategy simplifies migration and may lower digital preservation
costs by reducing the amount of customized reformatting needed as
technology changes, it does not eliminate the need for regular
migration of digital materials. Software and standards both
continue to evolve and even repositories with structurally
homogeneous holdings can expect to be required to migrate their
digital materials periodically.

Current methods fall far short of what is required to preserve
digital materials. All current preservation methods involve trade-
offs between what is desirable from the standpoint of
functionality, dependability, and cost and what is possible and
affordable with current technologies and methods. Consequently,
most repositories are coping by employing interim and less than
desirable strategies, if they are addressing digital preservation
issues at all. For example, the simplicity and universality of
printing to paper or microfilm come at the expense of great losses
in the functionality of digital information. Migration strategies
that involve reformatting of digital materials to a simple standard
format usually eliminate the structure of documents and
relationships imbedded in databases. Computation capabilities,
graphic display, indexing, and other features often are lost, thus
limiting future analytical potential. Normalization to standard
formats is not always technically feasible and it usually is quite
costly.

Archives and libraries must also contend with entirely new
forms of electronically-enabled discourse and new forms of artistic
and cultural expression that do not have predecessors in the analog
world. No current preservation method is adequate for preserving
dynamic data objects from complex systems. There are no
established conceptual models or technical processes for preserving
multi-media works, interactive hyper-media, on-line dialogues, or
many of the new electronic forms being created today. The archival
requirements to preserve content, context, and structure and to
maintain the capability to display, link, and manipulate digital
objects only heighten their software dependency.

The preservation community is only beginning to explore
possible alternatives to storing digital information in "software-
independent" form. Rothenberg (1995) proposed an approach for
maintaining the content of digital materials intact without losing
the ability to retrieve meaning-rich sources. He recommended
retaining the original document in its original format encapsulated
in a virtual "envelope" that contains software instructions for
retrieval, display, and processing of the message in the envelope.
The envelopes would contain contextual information and the
transformational history of each object. Execution of the
instructions would rely on an archive of hardware and software
emulators or on instructions in the envelope with specifications
to construct emulators.

Important research is underway to define standards for data
interchange that can support electronic commerce and satisfy
business requirements in a variety of environments. A major
research project at the University of Pittsburgh is defining
metadata requirements for evidence that will support the need for
integrity, authenticity, reliability, and archiving through
standards for "metadata encapsulated objects" (Bearman and
Sochats). Archives, libraries, and other institutions with
preservation responsibilities will benefit if systems are built to
implement such metadata standards. Wide scale adoption of data and
communication standards by the originators of digital information
to support current business needs will also facilitate long-term
preservation. Rapid implementation of electronic commerce depends
on widespread development and adoption of standards for EDI
(electronic data interchange) transaction sets under auspices of
the ANSI X.12 committee, and many organizations are adopting
standards for format and definitions to enable exchange, reuse, and
sale of digital information and to reduce conversion and
maintenance costs. Standards initiatives that address business
needs for the secure and reliable exchange of digital information
among the current generation of systems will impose standardization
and normalization of data that ultimately will facilitate
migrations to new generations of technology. Yet to benefit fully
from the synergy between business needs and preservation
requirements we have to move beyond simply paying lip service to
cultural heritage concerns and recognize that equally critical
social goals, such as long-term genetic research, monitoring global
environmental change, locating nuclear waste sites, and
establishing property rights are also dependent on long-term access
to reliable, electronic evidence.

Much remains to be done in research, development, and
implementation before we can assume that even a small portion of
our digital heritage will survive more than a few years. It is
fair to say that the state of development in digital preservation
remains largely experimental. Only a few libraries, archives, and
other institutions have established digital preservation programs,
while most research and innovation comes from pilot projects and
prototypes. Tested methods that have proven effective on a small
scale in a limited number of repositories are not feasible for
preservation of many of the types of digital materials that
archives and libraries will confront in their preservation
endeavors.

Areas for Research and Development

The current state of digital preservation suggests several
fruitful areas for research and development. I will discuss four
areas: storage media, migration, conversion, and management tools.
These four domains are often mutually dependent and ultimately must
to be integrated into an infrastructure for digital preservation.
Yet better solutions are necessary in all four areas before such
integration can occur. Finally, I will share some observations
about the issues of scale and cost that must be considered if we
are going to achieve any degree of systematic preservation.

Storage Media

The limited life of magnetic and optical media pose a
significant problem, although this is not the primary limiting
factor for digital preservation. Recent research on the longevity
of magnetic media indicate a useful life span of 10 to 30 years if
they are handled and stored properly. Some optical disk
technologies promise life spans of up to 100 years. Most
authorities argue that enhanced media longevity is of little value
because current media outlast the software and devices needed to
retrieve recorded information.

Nevertheless, improvements in the stability, capacity, and
longevity of the base storage media are needed to drastically
reduce the vulnerability of digital materials to loss and
alteration and to lower storage costs. Ample research and
experience provide evidence of what can go wrong with magnetic
media as a result of binder degradation, magnetic particle
instabilities, and substrate deformation (Van Bogart). Optical
media are susceptible to damage from high humidity, rapid and
extreme temperature fluctuations, and contamination from airborne
particulate matter (U.S. National Archives and Records
Administration). To prevent these problems, it is imperative to
store magnetic and optical media under strict environmental
controls that are not always available, affordable, or convenient.
Even modest improvements which produce storage media with larger
per unit storage capacities and greater tolerance to variations in
temperature and humidity will lower preservation costs by lessening
the need for strict environmental controls, reducing the frequency
with which digital media must be "refreshed" through recopying, and
decreasing the number of storage units that must be handled.

This raises the question, however, of whether research on
incremental improvements in current storage technologies will
benefit preservation in the long run or whether we should seek
alternative approaches to digital storage that more adequately meet
archival requirements. As a frame of reference it is worth
remembering that microfilm, which is considered the only acceptable
archival storage medium, lasts at least 300 years with minimal
maintenance if stored properly. Last June, the Los Alamos National
Laboratory announced the invention of a High-Density Read-Only
Memory (HD-ROM) technology that uses an ion beam to inscribe
information on pins of stainless steel, iridium, or other
materials. The HD-ROM is capable of storing 180 times more
information than current CD-ROM technology at roughly one-half
percent of CD-ROM costs. According to the release about this
technology, the HD-ROM is impervious to material degradation and it
requires no bit stream interpreter because the technology can
describe in human-readable form all of the instructions needed to
interpret the data (LANL Ion Beam Storage). Such an approach
illustrates the potential for solutions built on entirely new
storage technologies.

Migration

Better methods for migration of digital materials to new
generations of hardware and software are much needed for digital
preservation regardless of breakthroughs in mass storage
technologies. Planning for migration is difficult because there is
limited experience with the types of migrations needed to maintain
access to complex digital objects over extended periods of time.
When a custodian assumes responsibility for preserving a digital
object it may be difficult to predict when migration will be
necessary, how much reformatting will be needed, and how much
migration will cost. There are no reliable or comprehensive data on
costs associated with migrations, either for specific technologies
and formats or for particular collections, and little research
underway on methodologies that would reduce the costs and burdens
of migration.

The preservation community as a whole would benefit
tremendously from the development of backward compatibility paths
that would be included as a standard feature of all software.
Backward compatibility or migration paths would enable a new
generation of software to "read" data from older systems without
substantial reformatting and without loss of retrieval, display and
computational capabilities. Although backward compatibility is
increasingly common within software product lines, migration paths
are not commonly provided between competing software products or
for products that fail in the marketplace.

Stewards of digital material have a range of options for
preserving digital information. One might preserve an exact
replica of a digital record with complete display, retrieval, and
computational functionality, or a representation of the record with
only partial computation capabilities, or a surrogate for the
record such as an abstract, summary, or aggregation. Detail or
background noise might be dropped out intentionally through
successive generations of migration, and custodians might change
the format or storage media. Enhancements are technologically
possible through clean-up, mark-up, and linkage, or by adding
indexing and other features. These technological possibilities in
turn impose serious new responsibilities to present digital
materials to users in a way that allows them to determine the
authenticity of the information and its relationship to the
original record. Methods to document changes in digital objects
during their life span need to be incorporated as an integral part
of improved migration methods.

There are few well developed methods for preserving and
migrating software so that it might be used to recreate digital
documents that have the "look and feel" of the original sources.
Maintaining repositories of obsolete hardware and software has been
discussed periodically, but usually dismissed out of hand as too
expensive and not demonstrably feasible. This approach deserves
more serious consideration as a strategy for maintaining continuing
access to certain types of digital materials. Feasibility studies
and cost/benefit analyses should be conducted to determine the
technological, economic, and commercial feasibility of maintaining
selected legacy software systems and performing specialized
migrations or, alternatively, of building and maintaining software
emulators. Such an approach would support replay of original
sources and contribute to the preservation of software as a
significant cultural and intellectual resource in its own right.

Conversion

Faster, cheaper, and higher resolution conversion technologies
are another critical element needed to make digital preservation
feasible on a large scale. Most archivists and librarians accept
the fact that we live in a hybrid environment where paper,
microfilm, video, and magnetic and optical media need to
interoperate in a more integrated and transparent manner. The vast
majority of primary sources today still reside on paper and/or
microfilm with little chance that we will see the mass conversion
of existing archival and library holdings to digital formats.
Research and planning for digital preservation must recognize that
we will be dealing with conversion for a long time and that
investments in improving capture rates, accuracy, resolution, and
verification will have long-term benefits. Moreover, improvements
in conversion technologies may support hybrid solutions to
preservation and access problems by permitting repositories to
store certain formats of digital material on stable media, such as
microfilm, with on demand conversion to digital form for analysis
and reuse. Efforts to capture and store descriptive mark-up on
film for subsequent conversion are hampered by unacceptable error
rates in OCR technology and cumbersome conversion processes
(Giguere).

Management Tools

A fourth area for research is in the development of management
tools for digital libraries and archives that integrate descriptive
control and maintenance with storage technologies. Dynamic digital
objects, such as those found in hypertext systems, pose special
management problems for both current and future retrieval and
reuse. The boundaries of hypertext sources, like those found on
the World Wide Web today, are difficult to ascertain because no
single party or institution controls changes in the nodes and links
that make hypertext objects live and highly responsive information
resources. A high degree of volatility accompanies these objects
because the contents of nodes change, the sites where information
resources are stored change, and the links between nodes change,
move, and vanish. Some recent tools, such as the MOMspider (Multi-
Owner Maintenance Spider) and Web:Lookout are capable of traversing
a portion of the Web and noting maintenance problems such as broken
links, moved documents, modified documents, and objects that have
exceeded their expiration dates (Ackerman and Fielding). While
tools such as these are useful for current maintenance, they do not
address long-term preservation concerns. If further developed to
address preservation problems, tools such as these have the
potential to serve as filters, identify similar or identical
objects, and monitor for maintenance problems.

Research and development of tools that would imbed more
intelligence about the preservation status of digital material into
the objects themselves would make monitoring and maintenance of
large digital collections more automatic. Current methods for
monitoring the physical status of digital materials are labor
intensive, unreliable, and potentially damaging to the materials
themselves. Recommended procedures for monitoring physical
deterioration of magnetic tape, for example, involve reading a
small sample of tapes periodically to determine whether any data
losses have occurred (Eaton). The potential exists to build
monitoring and reporting mechanisms into digital objects, storage
systems, and network architectures that could support self-
reporting of physical status and initiate automatic maintenance
procedures.

Despite differences, some lessons from traditional
preservation are transferable to the digital environment. In order
to avoid commitments that far exceed available resources and costly
rescue and restoration efforts, preservation must become an
integral part of the planning, design, and resource allocation for
digital libraries and archives. Integration of preservation
requirements and methods with access and maintenance systems is
essential to fully and efficiently support the processes of
migration, regeneration, and documentation of the life of digital
objects. Planning for preservation must become an integral part of
the design and management of digital libraries and archives. If
left as an afterthought, there is little reason to believe that
long-term preservation of digital information will be any more
affordable than preservation of conventional formats has been.

Some concluding comments

In closing, I would like to mention three issues that I
discussed only in passing. One concern is the question of scale
and scalability. The preservation community has at its disposal a
variety of tactics for digital preservation that appear to work
effectively for certain types of materials in certain restricted
environments, but we have not yet developed solutions that are
scalable to the general problem of digital preservation. This is
not to suggest that there is or should be a single solution to
digital preservation. The methods used will vary depending upon
the complexity of the original data objects, the extent to which
the functionality for computation, display, indexing, and
authentication must be maintained, and the requirements of current
or anticipated users. But any solution must be scalable from the
laboratory, prototype, or pilot project to the wide range of
individuals and institutions who have a need to make digital
materials last longer than the current generation of technology
permits.

Another closely related issue is the question of
affordability. Regardless of how the responsibility for digital
preservation is distributed, societies only allocate a small and
finite amount of resources to preserving scholarly and cultural
resources. And in the digital environment it seems likely that
more preservation responsibilities will be distributed to
individual creators, rights holders, distributors, small
institutions, and other players in the production and dissemination
process. Therefore, it seems imperative that digital preservation
technologies become affordable and accessible to the wide range of
individuals and institutions that will attempt to preserve digital
materials.

Finally, it would be beneficial to both the preservation
community and to those conducting research on issues of longevity,
migration, and conversion if there were more venues for exchange of
ideas, requirements, and recent developments. Without a continuing
dialogue between humanists, preservationists, and the scientific
community it is difficult to include preservation requirements in
scientific research endeavors, and it is challenging for those of
us outside the scientific community to keep up with and evaluate
new products. I hope that the discussion we are beginning at this
conference will lead to more regular and formal processes for
linking the needs of scholars and preservationists with the
research agendas and projects of scientists.

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